2/14/09

The role reversal is complete. After years of Dad bringing me and Mom valentines, today I brought him candy. “Is this a birthday present?” It’s red, it’s heart-shaped, your birthday is in August . . . “No, it’s a valentine’s day present.” “It’s full of goodies, right?” “Yes,” I say, opening it for him. Dad starts feeling the chocolates, finding out how many there are. “A whole lot of goodies, wow,” he says. He chooses one at random and pops it in his mouth. “Delicious. Deeee-licious.” “is Valentine’s Day an official holiday?” “Sort of. A lot of people buy flowers and candy and sometimes jewelry.” “Expensive stuff.”

We have accidentally given Dad a false idea – today I put on the cd of Peruvian flutes, so he could listen to it after I left and he said “that music hardly got out of peru, but now it’s suddenly very popular.” I was confused at first – it’s not like Peruvian music is suddenly on the top 40 – but then I realized that because Dad likes the music, all of his visitors keep playing it for him and, since he hears it so much, he assumes that everybody is listening to it all the time, like people are driving down the street blasting pan flute music from their cars.
I stumbled upon another misconception that’s apparently been bothering Dad for a while now –

I’d noticed that he was washing his eyes a lot and fussing about them. The other day, he even asked me for his eyedrops, which we had stopped bothering with, basically because there’s nothing left to lose. When I gave him the tiny, expensive bottle he started to pop it into his mouth – I had to grab it from him to stop him from swallowing it. I said “Dad, you asked for drops for your EYES,” and he said, “Oh, yes,” and asked me to put them in for him. Anyway, it turns out that after hearing about Edith, Kate S.’s cat, who had to have her eye removed after a severe infection, Dad had been thinking that they might have to take out HIS eyes. I was able to reassure him that they weren’t going to do that to him, and he seemed to feel a lot better.